I often find myself saying in Greece that this country needs
some law and order, decent courts and an efficient legal process. I suspect
that I place too much confidence in the actual integrity of such functions. Our
surface adherence to law and order is often just a veneer. While like many I
can say “some of my best friends have been lawyers…..” and indeed most are the
salt of the earth, the barrel inevitably hides some rotten apples and I briefly
now describe four such from major countries.
 |
| Ernst Kaltenbrunner |
Standing at 6’4, Ernst
Kaltenbrunner (1903-46) with his deep facial scars and aggressive bearing,
was an intimidating presence even among the brutes of the Nazi Third Reich. An
Austrian, trained as a lawyer and admitted to the Viennese Bar, Kaltenbrunner
became a leader of the Austrian Nazis in the period leading up to the Anschluss
in 1938. He became head of the Austrian SS, built concentration camps and,
after hostilities started, calmly watched demonstrations on helpless prisoners
to discover the relative efficiency of death by shooting, hanging or gassing.
Rapidly promoted, he succeeded assassinated Heydrich as
Gauleiter of the Czech territories in 1943 and was subordinate only to Himmler
in the SS. He played a leading part in the foul concentration camp system and
in implementing the unspeakable Final Solution. After the failed 20 July 1944
attempt on Hitler’s life, Kaltenbrunner was in charge of the prosecution of the
conspirators, whom he gloated over murderously in court.
The most senior SS officer to be captured by the Allies, he
was tried and condemned to death at Nuremberg. Hanged in 1946, Kaltenbrunner
was a disgrace to his profession, to his country and to humanity.
-------------------------------------
Almost as odious was Andrey
Vyshinsky (1883 -1954), Stalin’s favourite state prosecutor. Born in Odessa
to Polish-Catholic parents, he became a Menshevik in 1903 and was imprisoned
for his part in the 1905 revolutionary turmoil. In prison he befriended
Bolshevik Stalin; on release he eventually became a successful lawyer in
Moscow. After the 1917 Revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks and became a state
prosecutor, later being appointed rector of Moscow University in 1925. His
legal impartiality can be judged by his doctrine that a court should consider
not just the evidence but also “wider social perspectives” in the context of
“the class struggle”.
 |
| Andrey Vyshinsky |
Vyshinsky rose to prominence as the chief prosecutor in the
1936 Moscow Show Trials following on from Stalin’s Great Purge of his
ideological enemies. Vyshinsky’s ferocious language gives a hint of the
poisonous atmosphere, wholly devoid of justice:
Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who
hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that
vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a
bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! Down with these
abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of
foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of
capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation!
Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own
throats!
The accused almost all
confessed to their crimes, brainwashed by their own twisted Marxist logic and
bowing to physical threats, as brilliantly described by Arthur Koestler in his Darkness at Noon. Vyshinsky became an
intimate of baleful Stalin, Beria and Molotov and held high office in the
1940s. British diplomat Sir Frank Roberts described him as “a cringing toadie”.
Vyshinsky corrupted Russian
justice for at least two generations and whether the rot has been to any degree
stopped under Vladimir Putin is far from certain.
------------------------------
We British often take a smug
view when reviewing the faults of totalitarian nations’ legal systems, but in
the relatively recent past the law in England was dominated by a reactionary
clique. This clique was centred around Lord Goddard, but also included future
Lord Chancellors, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, later Lord Kilmuir, a fanatical
homophobe while Home Secretary in the early 1950s, and Sir Reginald
Manningham-Buller, later Lord Dilhorne, who oddly mishandled the trial of
well-connected Dr John Bodkin Adams (allegedly implicated in 163 murders) and
earned the nickname “Bullying Manner”.
 |
| Lord Goddard |
Rayner Goddard, (1877-1971), who became Lord Chief Justice of
England from 1946-58, was a powerful judge - with 12 years in office, few other
judges would dare to challenge him. He belonged to what is now thankfully an
extinct breed “the hanging and flogging judge” – a group with vocal Tory
support in the 1950s. Such judges, notorious for their severity, were in the
tradition of Judge Jeffreys and his Bloody Assizes of 1685.
Judicial corporal punishment
(the use of the cat o’nine tails and the birch) was abolished in 1948 but
strenuously supported by Goddard right up to 1958. The judiciary also opposed
all attempts to abolish capital punishment, with Goddard in the forefront. In
1952 Goddard presided over the trial of Craig and Bentley for the murder of a
policeman. The policeman had caught the pair in a burglary and Craig had shot
him dead: Bentley was supposed to have shouted “Let him have it, Chris!” but
this is disputed. Craig was 16 and too young to hang, but Bentley was 19
(though with a mental age of 12) and legally an accessory. He was hanged,
despite the jury having recommended mercy. Goddard’s conduct of the case was
very partial – his summing-up was particularly tendentious – and Maxwell-Fyfe
as Home Secretary claimed there were no grounds for reprieving him.
The case became a cause celèbre: the journalist Bernard
Levin criticised Goddard and Manningham-Buller proposed he be prosecuted for
criminal libel. When Levin repeated his strictures 20 years later, Levin was
black-balled from the lawyer-heavy Garrick Club! In 1998, after many a
campaign, the murder conviction of Bentley was quashed by the then Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Bingham, on the grounds of serious misdirection of the jury by
Lord Goddard, sadly 42 years after the event.
A
sinister twist to Goddard’s conduct emerged after his death. His clerk revealed
that, such was Goddard’s excitement while handing down a death sentence that he
ejaculated and always required a second pair of pin-striped trousers. It seems
that Goddard derived some perverted thrill from condemning prisoners. The
closed culture of the Law is much at fault in supporting and revering such
personalities.
My final dubious lawyer is
American who found fame in that most American of blood sports, the witch-hunt
and the crusade against evil – yet who hobnobbed with many “colourful”
characters whose passage through the pearly gates would be far from assured.
 |
| Roy Cohn |
Roy Cohn
(1927-86) was born into the purple of a wealthy Jewish legal family (his father
was a judge) in New York. A clever pupil, he excelled in law and was soon
working in the state attorney’s office. He shone in the prosecution of
communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, both of whom went to the chair for
espionage. Cohn’s ruthless, confrontational and combative style was admired by Senator
Joe McCarthy, then becoming feared as a red-baiter.
Cohn became chief counsel to
McCarthy’s senate investigations committee in 1953 – to the chagrin of Robert
Kennedy who wanted the job himself. Cohn harassed civil servants, Hollywood
actors and army officers with his dreaded refrain: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party? Answer
Yes or No.” He became a well-known public figure, but he and McCarthy made
the mistake of taking on the Army establishment and the TV coverage of the
outrageous hearings appalled the US public – helped by Ed Murrow’s critical
probing. Censured by the Senate, soon McCarthy lost his influence and in 1954
Cohn was out of a job.
His talents as an advocate
could not be overlooked. He intimidated prosecutors, flustered witnesses and
impressed jurors. His clients included, inevitably, Donald Trump but also
Cardinal Spellman, various property billionaires and, more darkly, suspected Mafia
bosses Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno. He lived a high life, friendly
with Ronald Reagan, frequenting Steve Rubell’s louche Studio 54, favourite of the glitterati. Cohn always sailed
close to the wind and in 1986 his past sins caught up with him and he was
disbarred from practising law in New York. On four counts, he was described as
“unethical”, “unprofessional”, and “particularly reprehensible”. Including misuse
of escrow funds and trying to obtain a deathbed signature improperly.
An early rabid persecutor of
gays, Cohn himself died of AIDS, although in denial, only admitting to liver
cancer. Cohn was not admired by many
lawyers, his overreaching ambition proving his undoing.
SMD
13.11.15
Text Copyright © Sidney
Donald 2015
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